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METRO VANCOUVER -- It’s not quite a taxi service, and not quite a limo one — but Otis Perrick of Ripe Rides believes his licensed, mid-level luxury sedan-for-hire service is just what this city needs.

Amid the heated controversy between Vancouver’s taxi companies and Uber, which seeks to operate in the city, Perrick has secured all necessary approvals to start offering point-to-point service with digital dispatch.

“We cannot be flagged, but will be digitally hailed,” Perrick said.

Now the North Vancouver entrepreneur is just waiting for his 20-car fleet of 2016 Cadillac XTSs to be delivered. He expects to start business in December.

“You still get the chauffeured experience,” Perrick said. “The driver is in a dress code. The price you’re paying is a $20 base rate then $5 for the next three K. It goes down to $2.60. If there’s waiting time or speed is less than 18k/h, it’s 75 cents.”

In comparison, limousines charge an hourly minimum rate of $75. Taxis offer a “flagged” fare where they can be hailed from the street, picked up at a stand or digitally or phone-in dispatched. Uber is a San Francisco-based company that allows generally unregulated individuals to offer rides, for a fee, in their own cars.

Ripe Rides will be offering “properly insured vehicles, a regulated rate system with a licensed trained driver,” Perrick said. Drivers will be Ripe Rides employees and will hold City of Vancouver chauffeur permits and have passed Vancouver Police criminal checks.

In mid-September, the city approved bylaw changes to allow metering in sedans, limousines and SUVs. Perrick has also secured 20 Passenger Transportation Board special authorization licences.

“We’ve been above board, very transparent, following the regulations. That’s what we want to do,” Perrick said.

Perrick conceived of Ripe while travelling as owner of Disruptive Media Publishers, which makes original and licensed content that allows users to personalize and showcase their online personas. Disruptive produces 75 per cent of the top selling Xbox and PlayStation personalization items, Perrick said, and holds licences with major games makers and sports franchises such as the NHL, NBA, NFL and Warner Brothers. In 2013, the company was reported to have $34 million in gross revenue.

Perrick said he and other travelling executives often use so-called “black car” luxury point-to-point car service in other global cities but no one in Vancouver was offering the service.

Perrick believes the key is to not just provide digital dispatch but to manage expectations so customers know how they will have to wait and the ability to digitally see where the car is, in real time.

Ripe Rides built its own app, which is “probably very similar” to Uber’s and Lyft’s, but “we control it from the ground up,” Perrick said. “We can track how hard the car’s braking. Is the car cornering too hard? You know that you’re getting into a car that’s tracked properly and maintenance is done.”

Perrick, 40, was born and raised in North Vancouver into a family of six children, five of whom are adopted and all from different ethnic backgrounds. His father, lawyer Ron Perrick, was one of the first NHL sports agents.

Perrick was an Electronic Arts product marketing manager before he left to start Disruptive. Three-year-old Ripe Rides is self-funded.

Ripe Rides is working with PubNub for geocaching and geofencing so the customer can track the driver’s position in real time, and Twilio to mask client and driver phone numbers in voice and text cloud communication.

“The idea is your phone is everything,” Perrick said. “Accessibility is what we’re offering. You may walk out of Rogers Arena with a few friends. Hey, we need to be taken somewhere. You can split the fare with your friends.

He expects daytime demand from downtown lawyers, realtors, insurance brokers and tourists used to digital dispatch in other cities. Evening business will come from the “entertainment district crowd.” He expects strong demand from Vancouver’s growing downtown cadre of tech workers. “If I’m walking out of a restaurant, I would like to use a fancier car.”

Vancouver is underserved, said Perrick, who commissioned a report prepared by transportation economist David Gillen, director of the Centre for Transportation Studies at the University of B.C., which showed that Vancouver’s market has room for a new product offering (Vancouver had 0.64 taxis per 1,000 people in 2013 compared to a national average of 1.08 taxis per 1,000 in 2010), and that Ripe is a new product that isn’t in competition with taxis and won’t be taking business from pre-booked limousines.

Perrick plans to start with 20 vehicles “which we believe won’t be enough to satisfy the demand, which we’ll be able to prove, and that should allow us to scale appropriately throughout B.C. as our starting point.”

He envisions a future where taxi companies and limousine providers become his customers.

“If it was easy, anybody would do it. We were able to change and put through a new rate structure and create the mid-tier digital dispatch option and product for Vancouver.”

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